This paper describes a collaborative journey with a group of primary school teachers and principals within a context of curriculum change in Hong Kong. This collaboration, which builds on hope, trust, reflections and authenticity, elicits participants' 'voices' through narratives and conversations. An Action Research as iterative, critical and collaborative engages research participants to a research world which celebrates the success of change by improvement, the collaboration by mutual contribution to shared values and beliefs, and the reconstruction of curriculum work by ongoing critique and transformation. Teachers' stories, which are the constructs of their personal lives intertwined with professional lives, are embodied of participants' critical reflections on the place, space, purpose, content and process of teacher curriculum decision-making at the time of curriculum change. Through sharing and negotiation, ownership and participation as well as agreement and consensus, this action research empowers participants to act and talk in reflection about curriculum work for enhancing the effectiveness of teaching and learning. Reflecting on this collaborative research journey, the paper further poses a question when choosing to choose educational research. This question challenges researchers and other stakeholders to critically reflect on educational research whether it is moving towards an optimistic future or a dead end.
[Copyright of Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) at http://www.aare.edu.au]

Research literature has long indicated that action research may stimulate practitioners themselves to actively evaluate the quality of their practice. This study is designed to report the use of action research for the development of early years professional practice by analyzing the pre-project and the post-project video-filmed teaching events. The finding was that action research might support knowledge development in the teacher profession. However, the teacher's ability to accommodate outside knowledge might be limited by one's inside knowledge. The study helps to clarify the assumptions and potentials of action research for teachers learning to teach.
[Copyright of Educational Action Research is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09650790802011908]

The study aims to develop an instrument for research on teacher self-management in the school organization. In this paper, teacher self-management is conceptualized as a self iterative process which comprises five stages; namely, (i) the Environmental Analysis Stage, (ii) the Planning and Affiliating Stage, (iii) the Developing and Directing Stage, (iv) the Implementing Stage, and (v) the Evaluating and Monitoring Stage. Based on this conception, the instrument developed consists of five subscales. The developed instrument was field tested in 63 schools including 1,183 teachers. The analysis showed that the estimated reliability and the predictive and construct validity of the instrument were satisfactorily high. It is hoped that the instrument may provide a basic tool for related empirical studies and for understanding of teacher's self-management practices in school.
[Copyright of Educational Research & Evaluation is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1076/edre.4.3.235.6957]

This paper provides information on a measure that was developed to assess children's level of development at preschool and entry to school level, as well as their readiness for formal schooling. This measure - Who Am I? - is based on early copying and writing skills and is designed to identify the broad stages of development that underlie children's readiness for more formal learning in a school situation. Although originally developed in Australia, it has now been used in studies in a number of different countries, including Canada, and data from these studies provide some insight into the variations in development that are associated with different patterns of preschool provision and different ages of entry into an educational program. The results of these studies indicate that Who Am I? provides a valid measure of development across different language and cultural groups and can therefore be used as a tool to evaluate the effectiveness of different forms of early childhood provision, as well as children's readiness for more formal learning in a school situation.
[Copyright of Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19404150802380597]